HERALDRY

We are in the year 800, and now, across the European continent—from present-day Portugal to European Russia—we can count at least two empires, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Carolingian Empire, along with several kingdoms. Charlemagne had conquered a very important one: the Lombard Kingdom. He had not suppressed it; he was a sovereign with many crowns: Karolus gratia Dei rex Francorum ac Langobardorum ac patricius Romanorum. In any case, even if he had done so, the memory of the Lombard Kingdom of Pavia—not yet the Lombard-Carolingian Kingdom—would have remained vivid: the Lombard duchies of Spoleto and Benevento were there to attest to it.

Charlemagne was indeed Magnus, there is no doubt about that, but he was not absolute. The Frankish king and emperor never concerned himself with Anglo-Saxon Britain, and in the north of Spain, the Kingdom of Asturias remained independent. Furthermore, in the Iberian Peninsula, before the birth of Charlemagne or his grandfather Charles Martel, a glorious kingdom had time to rise and fall: the Kingdom of the Visigoths. The Kingdom of Asturias sought to present itself as the heir to the Visigothic Kingdom in order to organize the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, which had fallen into the hands of the Muslims of Al-Ándalus, under the Umayyad Caliphate. To simplify matters, those same Arab and North African warriors in Spain, initially not particularly alarmed by the small Christian kingdom, eventually decided to break away from Damascus: in 929, they would establish the independent Caliphate of Córdoba.